Broad Band The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the InternetClaire L. Evans2/2024This isn’t a complete history of the internet, but it’s a cool look at some of the women who played pivotal roles in shaping various highlights of its history. I was fascinated with the early chapters which honed in on what i remembered of my own early use of computers in the 70s and 80s. The final chapters were interesting, but focused on bits of the web that i wasn’t much a part of. Overall, it was a good look at the horribly-outnumbered women who made a difference in tech. |
Eerie Tales from the School of Screams Graham Annable2/2024This book is set up as separate creepy tales as told by students in a classroom, but then ties it all together in the end for a somewhat satisfying conclusion, although it hints at further mystery. The drawings are sketchy but clean with lush colors—a different color pallette for each tale. It had sly humor and wasn’t too scary. |
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage Sydney Padua4/2024I borrowed this book from someone and while it’s technically a graphic novel, there’s a ton of notes at the bottom of nearly every page. The notes go into depth on who Ada Lovelace (actually Ada Byron, Lady of Lovelace) and Charles Babbage were and what they worked on, pulling information on their lives from a myriad of sources. The first bit of the book chronicles what is known to be true about Babbage’s pre-computer inventions and Lovelace’s programming of them, then it takes off into imagined adventures that still have tendrils in some random facts about them. The greatest thing about this book is the utter joy of the author and her enthusiasm for these characters. It helps that the drawings reflect that wonderful curiousity in the two heros. So it’s a weird read, being a text-heavy graphic novel, but it contains a whole lot of information on these important historic figures. |
Haru SpringJoe Latham4/2024I saw this in a bookstore and it looked good but i was pretty disappointed. It’s beautifully illustrated, each page an immersive landscape, but man, it felt like no one edited it. The story meandered and ended up introducing elements that never went anywhere. It was presented as a hero’s journey, but the journey was muddied and never quite resolved. And on top of that, about halfway through the book, there started to be little bits of text that explained what was going on in the panels, which, c’mon, that’s what the pictures are for! It all seemed very heavy-handed and i found myself losing interest as i went along. It’s sad that someone can spend so much time and energy to create 267 pages of beautiful artwork but not have anyone tell them to make it a better story. |
Thorn The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips 1982-1986, and Other Early DrawingsJeff Smith5/2024This is a collection of Jeff Smith’s college comic strip Thorn, which was the first iteration of the story and characters that became his fantastic comic book series Bone. It’s a little rough, doesn’t really come to any conclusion, and has a few odd non-storyline tangents, but it was really cool to see where Bone began. |
Nothing Special Volume One: Through the Elder WoodsKatie Cook5/2024I’d read this in its online form and was pleased to find that Katie managed to transform the very tall scrollable images of the webcomic to flow nicely in a book format. The characters are fun, the story builds, and the drawing and coloring are first rate. Looking forward to further volumes! |
Listen, People. Compassionate listening and rising from suicide crisisStar Ford5/2024My sister wrote this book and it’s not in the normal realm of books that i read, but i thought i should be a good brother and read it. The formatting was a little stilted, but the writing was good. I wasn’t quite sure what it was about at first, but caught on (it’s mostly about a specific crisis center in New Mexico called Agora) and there were some interesting takeaways. One criticism is that there were a lot of statements that had no refereneces or citations, which seemed somewhat suspect in a nonfiction book. But maybe that’s the way the “self-help” industry operates. |
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale I: My Father Bleeds HistoryII: And Here my Troubles BeganArt Spiegelman6/2024I’ve been aware of these books for decades and finally read them. I expected it to be a chronicle of life in a prison camp but there was so much more to the story. A lot of it, unexpectedly, is Art talking with his father as his father recounts his life before, during, and after his time in German death camps. I can see why this is required reading for understanding the Holocaust—it puts a very real human life (in mouse form) into the narrative, showing the unimaginable horror of Nazi Germany for Jews. |
Lunar New Year Love Story Gene Luen Yang & Leuyen Pham6/2024Everything that comes from Gene Luen Yang is pure gold. This is a book about teen romance. I get a bit wrankled about 17-year-olds spouting off about “true love” but it was still a compelling narrative, even if it’s pretty obvious who Valentina, the hero of the story, is going to end up with. But like any good romance, even if you know the outcome, it’s the pitfalls along the way that make it a story. As predictable as the ending was, though, it still carried an emotional punch and satisfied that hunger to see the two young heroes find each other. Also, while some of the facial expressions were clunky, the overall illustrations were magical. |
Plain Jane and the Mermaid Vera Brosgol6/2024This book has a lot of similarity to Molly Ostertag’s The Girl from the Sea but it relies much more heavily on folklore of mermaids and selkies and it is set in victorian times when women were nearly property. It is beautifully illustrated and cleverly told and you get to see Jane learn and grow and show off that she’s tough and not to be trifled with. |
Claws of the Thunderbird Holling C. Holling7/2024I’d read a few of Holling Clancy Holling’s large fully-illustrated books when i was growing up like Paddle-to-the-Sea and Pagoo and loved them. This is one of his earlier stories—a tale of two Chippewa boys who are captured by, and then escape from, a band of Sioux. It was published in 1928 so reflects the sexism of the time, diminishing the contributions of the Chippewa Indian girl who joins the two boys as they all make their way home to warn their people of an imminent Sioux attack. You can see Holling’s attention to detail in the writing, but the two boys are absolutely indistinguishable from each other and there is more plot than character development. I don’t know what Holling’s ancestry is but the book has a weird “white man telling stories about Native Americans” vibe to it and there is a lot of coincidences to help the protagonists. The story moves along nicely, though, even if it gets a little far-fetched. |
The Map that Changed the World William Smith and the Birth of Modern GeologySimon Winchester9/2024I’ve read a few of Winchester’s books and found them all fascinating, but this one was a little blah. It’s an account of William Smith’s life and his great endeavor to map the geologic strata of England before anyone else had much of a clue what geologic strata were. There’s definitely some interesting tidbits in the book, but it got repetitive, talking more of Smith’s troubles than his actual map-making. |
Magic Pickle And the Roots of DoomScott Morse9/2024I remember the original Magic Pickle as being a bit more edgy. I looked back at it (published in 2002) and it was all black-and-white so it looked darker than this new full-color version. The story was not complicated and it was a bit corny (yes, lots of vegetable puns) but it was still fun and well-drawn. |
Rise of the Cat Hilo Book 10Judd Winick9/2024This series is always great, but this one was almost a stand-alone chapter, focusing solely on Polly (the cat) on her world, with no appearances by Hilo or and of the humans. Still a great, fun read with fantastic illustrations. |
The Deep Dark Molly Knox Ostertag9/2024I’d read this when it was an posted online but it was nice to revisit it in book farm. The characters are real and deep and Molly’s storytelling is top-notch. This book is much more adult than her previous works, which gives it some extra heft, both in length and in emotional resonance. Even knowing what the “deep dark” is, it was still an engrossing ride through love, loss, and secrets set in the desert southwest. |
Ash’s Cabin Jen Wang10/2024I am getting a little tired of seemingly every new graphic novel having a non-binary person as the main character, but at least in this case, that’s not the main focus. This is a story of growing up, feeling different, and finding oneself. I didn’t find this book to be quite as compelling as Jen Wang’s other books, but it was still good, and the drawings were detailed and beautiful. One nice thing was that the plot wasn’t too predictable, which was nice. |
The Jellyfish Boum10/2024I love Boum’s comics. This is, i think, her longest graphic novel and it certainly piqued my curiosity. I found it to be true and complex and a little bit sad, but very real as the main character, Odette, navigates her seemingly dead-end 20-something life as a medical challenge looms in her eye. The relentlessness of the drawings pack more of a punch than words ever could and it uses the graphic novel format the way it was meant to be used—to present things as only visuals can. And it does so even while being rendered in stark black-and-white. |
